The Reef

All day, since the late reluctant dawn, the rain had come down in torrents.  It streamed against Darrow’s high-perched windows, reduced their vast prospect of roofs and chimneys to a black oily huddle, and filled the room with the drab twilight of an underground aquarium.

The streams descended with the regularity of a third day’s rain, when trimming and shuffling are over, and the weather has settled down to do its worst.  There were no variations of rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs:  the grey lines streaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page of unparagraphed narrative.

George Darrow had drawn his armchair to the fire.  The time-table he had been studying lay on the floor, and he sat staring with dull acquiescence into the boundless blur of rain, which affected him like a vast projection of his own state of mind.  Then his eyes travelled slowly about the room.

It was exactly ten days since his hurried unpacking had strewn it with the contents of his portmanteaux.  His brushes and razors were spread out on the blotched marble of the chest of drawers.  A stack of newspapers had accumulated on the centre table under the “electrolier”, and half a dozen paper novels lay on the mantelpiece among cigar-cases and toilet bottles; but these traces of his passage had made no mark on the featureless dulness of the room, its look of being the makeshift setting of innumerable transient collocations.  There was something sardonic, almost sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately “made up” for its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and browns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would remember, and chairs and tables as impersonal as railway porters.

Darrow picked up the time-table and tossed it on to the table.  Then he rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went to the window.  Through the rain he could just discover the face of a clock in a tall building beyond the railway roofs.  He pulled out his watch, compared the two time-pieces, and started the hands of his with such a rush that they flew past the hour and he had to make them repeat the circuit more deliberately.  He felt a quite disproportionate irritation at the trifling blunder.  When he had corrected it he went back to his chair and threw himself down, leaning back his head against his hands.  Presently his cigar went out, and he got up, hunted for the matches, lit it again and returned to his seat.

The room was getting on his nerves.  During the first few days, while the skies were clear, he had not noticed it, or had felt for it only the contemptuous indifference of the traveller toward a provisional shelter.  But now that he was leaving it, was looking at it for the last time, it seemed to have taken complete possession of his mind, to be soaking itself into him like an ugly indelible blot.  Every detail pressed itself on his notice with the familiarity of an accidental confidant:  whichever way he turned, he felt the nudge of a transient intimacy…

The one fixed point in his immediate future was that his leave was over and that he must be back at his post in London the next morning.  Within twenty-four hours he would again be in a daylight world of recognized activities, himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor in the big whirring social and official machine.  That fixed obligation was the fact he could think of with the least discomfort, yet for some unaccountable reason it was the one on which he found it most difficult to fix his thoughts.  Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into the circle of its insistent associations.  It was extraordinary with what a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all:  the grimy carpet and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-piece, the clock with a gilt allegory under a dusty bell, the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed, the framed card of printed rules under the electric light switch, and the door of communication with the next room.  He hated the door most of all…

At the outset, he had felt no special sense of responsibility.  He was satisfied that he had struck the right note, and convinced of his power of sustaining it.  The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its vulgar setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to be enacting itself in some unmapped region outside the pale of the usual.  It was not like anything that had ever happened to him before, or in which he had ever pictured himself as likely to be involved; but that, at first, had seemed no argument against his fitness to deal with it.

Perhaps but for the three days’ rain he might have got away without a doubt as to his adequacy.  The rain had made all the difference.  It had thrown the whole picture out of perspective, blotted out the mystery of the remoter planes and the enchantment of the middle distance, and thrust into prominence every commonplace fact of the foreground.  It was the kind of situation that was not helped by being thought over; and by the perversity of circumstance he had been forced into the unwilling contemplation of its every aspect…

His cigar had gone out again, and he threw it into the fire and vaguely meditated getting up to find another.  But the mere act of leaving his chair seemed to call for a greater exertion of the will than he was capable of, and he leaned his head back with closed eyes and listened to the drumming of the rain.

A different noise aroused him.  It was the opening and closing of the door leading from the corridor into the adjoining room.  He sat motionless, without opening his eyes; but now another sight forced itself under his lowered lids.  It was the precise photographic picture of that other room.  Everything in it rose before him and pressed itself upon his vision with the same acuity of distinctness as the objects surrounding him.  A step sounded on the floor, and he knew which way the step was directed, what pieces of furniture it had to skirt, where it would probably pause, and what was likely to arrest it.  He heard another sound, and recognized it as that of a wet umbrella placed in the black marble jamb of the chimney-piece, against the hearth.  He caught the creak of a hinge, and instantly differentiated it as that of the wardrobe against the opposite wall.  Then he heard the mouse-like squeal of a reluctant drawer, and knew it was the upper one in the chest of drawers beside the bed:  the clatter which followed was caused by the mahogany toilet-glass jumping on its loosened pivots…

The step crossed the floor again.  It was strange how much better he knew it than the person to whom it belonged!  Now it was drawing near the door of communication between the two rooms.  He opened his eyes and looked.  The step had ceased and for a moment there was silence.  Then he heard a low knock.  He made no response, and after an interval he saw that the door handle was being tentatively turned.  He closed his eyes once more…

The door opened, and the step was in the room, coming cautiously toward him.  He kept his eyes shut, relaxing his body to feign sleep.  There was another pause, then a wavering soft advance, the rustle of a dress behind his chair, the warmth of two hands pressed for a moment on his lids.  The palms of the hands had the lingering scent of some stuff that he had bought on the Boulevard…He looked up and saw a letter falling over his shoulder to his knee…

“Did I disturb you?  I’m so sorry!  They gave me this just now when I came in.”

The letter, before he could catch it, had slipped between his knees to the floor.  It lay there, address upward, at his feet, and while he sat staring down at the strong slender characters on the blue-gray envelope an arm reached out from behind to pick it up.

“Oh, don’t—­don’t” broke from him, and he bent over and caught the arm.  The face above it was close to his.

“Don’t what?”

——­“take the trouble,” he stammered.

He dropped the arm and stooped down.  His grasp closed over the letter, he fingered its thickness and weight and calculated the number of sheets it must contain.

Suddenly he felt the pressure of the hand on his shoulder, and became aware that the face was still leaning over him, and that in a moment he would have to look up and kiss it…

He bent forward first and threw the unopened letter into the middle of the fire.